Oligopsony comments on A Kick in the Rationals: What hurts you in your LessWrong Parts? - Less Wrong

24 Post author: sixes_and_sevens 25 April 2012 12:12PM

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Comment author: Oligopsony 25 April 2012 07:22:38PM 11 points [-]

The linked essay makes perfect sense to me; and I'm certain the only reason it doesn't to you is indeed just the jargon. I don't think it's a particularly good analysis, ultimately, but for boring reasons that would make any essay weak, not because it's saying nothing. It's also not attempting to be a knock-down argument, not on account of its theoretical stance, but because it's a short blog post firing off some impressions in a perhaps unjustifiably confident tone, which of course Manly Man Rational Economists(tm) do all the time.

That said, my acquired intuition is that within [the cluster of people/ideaspace that the typical LessWrong reader would ugh-field as "pomo"], as within many other clusters, the lack of clarity in language does certainly covary with lack of clarity in actual thought. But I can't really say how much my own tribal academic loyalties (or desire to believe that I can understand anything that means anything) have helped produce that sensation.

Comment author: AlanCrowe 25 April 2012 10:01:52PM 9 points [-]

If the linked essay make perfect sense to you, perhaps you can explain this sentence

In capitalism, all debts finally break free from the sovereign and become infinite by conjoining flows.

Comment author: Oligopsony 25 April 2012 10:50:12PM 2 points [-]

"Back in the day, in Hanson's farmer epoch, public morality was maintained in part by cultivating in people a sense of gratitude towards God/the universe/society/one's parents/the resident nepotist with a sword; that their existence entailed debts that in principle couldn't be repaid. Nowadays under liberalism we've in principle thrown that out but everybody's still linked in a web of very explicit debts, and the web doesn't in principle have a center."

(You might say that this is a massive oversimplification to the extent that it's true, and you'd be right, of course.)